I had a bad recipe in my configuration and quelpa-checkout was failing in a fairly inscrutable manner. I traced this back to what I'm pretty sure was meant to be a call to error inside this condition-case.

While I was in here, I would like to suggest this switch from condition-case to condition-case-unless-debug, so that when I've got debug-on-error turned on I can debug the error at its source.

Following instructions here, I've already installed tar and made sure it works using shell commands (I'm using MSYS2 instead of MinGW, but the basic instruction appears to be the same — copy/simlink tar and the necessary DLLs to the PATH).

I'm also attempting to quelpa-use-package based on instructions here. It's not succeeding, and with the following errors:

Fetching originHEAD is now at 226f928 add framagit note'2018-06-18 08:56:23 +0200'Fetching originHEAD is now at 66c760b Merge branch 'jay/temp-buffer' into 'master''/chocolatey/bin/tar: /c/Users/Tariq/.emacs.d/.cache/quelpa/packages/quelpa-20180712.438.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory/chocolatey/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now2018-07-11 22:38:38 +0200'

Based on the following issue ticket that I found on the old repo (cached by Google here), this error might be caused by quelpa-build--create-tar, which tries to create or access /c/Users/Tariq/.emacs.d/.cache/quelpa/packages/quelpa-20180712.438.tar, which it can't, since this version of emacs can access directories and files using Windows-style paths.